The directorial debut of special effects titan Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner), Silent Running‘s set in a near-future where we never see Earth; all the action takes place aboard the Valley Forge, a massive spaceship bristling with domes containing plant and animal life — what may be some of the last plant and animal life, judging by the heavy tone under the conversations between the crew. Three of the four-man crew are jaded about their mission, bored with their exile; the fourth, Lowell (Bruce Dern) obviously cares about the ship’s payload — perhaps a little too much. The domes are maintained by Lowell and three drone robots; the other crew members like to unwind by racing electric carts through Lowell’s carefully-maintained preserves. There’s a certain degree of tension and desperation implied in the ship’s very existence. Waiting for new orders from Earth, one crew member notes how Lowell “… told me a whole story this morning, about how they’re going to re-foliate the Earth …” The other one’s one-word reply — “Again?” — tells you a lot about how things are going back home.

But the orders aren’t what Lowell was hoping for; instead, the Valley Forge and her sister ships are to destroy their domes and return home. And this, to Lowell, is unacceptable, and soon desperate times call for desperate measures. Bruce Dern, for a while, specialized in roles that in one way or another would represent the freak-out of the American spirit that took place in the ’60s and ’70s — Coming Home, Black Sunday, The King of Marvin Gardens, to name a few — and Silent Running, where Lowell is torn between orders and morals, is another great example of the caring-but-conflicted, crazy-sane roles he seemed to specialize in for a few years.

And like a lot of movies I mention in this column, Silent Running is hardly perfect; there’s a few moments in it that seem a little on the nose, a little obvious. I challenge even the most earnest soul to not stifle a giggle when Dern, clad in a flowing robe, wanders pensively through a bio-dome, raising his forearm to offer a descending hawk a place to land while Joan Baez’s voice soars on the soundtrack. Written by Michael Cimino, Deric Washburn and Stephen Bochco, Silent Running can get a little earnest; then again, considering what big-screen science fiction’s become — glossy idiotic toy ads like Transformers or big-budget action like I Am Legend — a little low-budget earnest contemplation seems like a welcome change.

And while Silent Running doesn’t have a huge budget, Trumbull still crafts some amazing and indelible images. The three drone-robots — rechristened Huey, Dewey and Louie by Lowell — were crafted by putting multiple-amputee stuntpeople in specially-constructed suits; the practical effect is still striking and affecting years later. As Lowell makes the drones his accomplices and heirs in his final fateful plan to disobey the order to destroy the last fields and forests, we actually care about what happens to the robots, and so does Lowell.

Silent Running finishes with a bleak moment of something like hope, hard-won at great cost; again, I have a fondness for a lot of bad ’70s science fiction not just because I grew up with it but also because of how grown-up it was, the two-bit budgets often wrapped around billion-dollar ideas and the desire to actually say something more than “wow!” And the film’s final shot — a moment of care and concern and possibility at the end of days and the edge of space — is stirring and haunting in a way that sneaks up on you, seemingly out of proportion to the modest film that’s gone before. Silent Running, like all the trailers I’ve seen for WALL-E, suggests that future generations will look on our works (to paraphrase Shelley’s “Ozymandias“) and, perhaps, find them to be inextricably linked to our failures. That’s a hard thing to contemplate; then again, maybe it should be.